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Suicide of the West: Ideas Are Not Enough
Jonah Goldberg summarizes the argument of his recent book this way:
It is my argument that capitalism and liberal democracy are unnatural. We stumbled into them in a process of trial and error but also blind luck, contingency, and happenstance a blink of an eye ago. The market system depends on bourgeois values, i.e. principles, ideas, habits, and sentiments that it did not create and cannot restore once lost. These values can only be transmitted two ways: showing and telling… Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude – and the effort that gratitude demands — all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. (p. 277)
Jonah wants to stay away from arguments about God — the very first sentence of the book is “There is no God in this book.” But he does spend considerable time acknowledging the extent to which Christianity is responsible for putting the circumstances in place that allowed the Miracle to occur. (“The Miracle” for Jonah is our modern systems of constitutional democracy and capitalism that have unleashed prosperity since the 18th century.) He even allows that Christianity was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the Miracle to happen:
Despite all this, the case is often made that Christianity gets the credit for the Miracle. And, in broad strokes, I am open to the idea that without Christianity, the Miracle may never have happened. But that is not quite the same argument as Christianity caused the Miracle (and it certainly did not intend it). However, the lesser claim, that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, certainly seems likely. (p. 109)
For Jonah, it is far more important that the Miracle happened than why it happened. But this inclination to avoid drawing conclusions concerning the causal origins of the Miracle has implications for his prescription for sustaining the Miracle. For then the only thing we can do is maintain those circumstances as best we can, as we have no way of knowing what other circumstances might also support the Miracle. That is the price of an ignorance of causal origins. (There is irony here insofar as the hallmark of Western civilization, and perhaps necessary to the Miracle itself, is the Western determination to not remain satisfied with material circumstance but seek and find the causal origins of those circumstances.)
Jonah’s solution for what ails us is:
Just as any civilization that was created by ideas can be destroyed by ideas, so can the conservative movement. That is why the cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment. (p. 344)
The problem is that, unlike our forebears, Jonah is a fideist with respect to liberal principles:
We tell ourselves that humans have natural or God-given rights. Where is the proof — the physical, tangible, visible proof? Don’t tell me a story; show me the evidence. The fact is we have rights because some believe they are in fact God-given, but far more people believe we should act as if they are God-given or in some other way “real.” (p. 83)
and
The simple fact is that the existence of natural rights, like the existence of God Himself, requires a leap of faith. (p. 142)
The Founders did not hold the existence of rights as a matter of faith. They either offered arguments for their existence (that’s the whole point of Locke’s exploration of the state of nature), or took those rights to be self-evidently true (as in the Declaration of Independence). To hold something self-evidently is not to hold it on faith; quite the opposite. It is to hold it as so obviously true that it is in no need of argumentation.
Jonah misunderstands the role of dogma. The object of dogma is not ideas but facts. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…” are not proposed as useful ideas to support a liberal dispensation, but as significant facts about the world that must be respected – and from which various ideas about the proper relationship of man to his government may be drawn, among other ideas.
The point is that Jonah’s prescription does not recreate the circumstances under which the Miracle was born: Those circumstances involved holding things like natural rights as facts, not as the useful fictions Jonah proposes. Since Jonah denies knowledge of the causal origins of the Miracle, he owes us an explanation of why the circumstances he proposes will support the Miracle as well as did the original circumstances under which it occurred.
This question extends to the cultural background of the Miracle. Jonah lists many of the cultural legacies of Christianity that contributed to the Miracle:
I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can’t be removed from it. I start the story of the Miracle in the 1700s, because that is where prosperity started to take off like a rocket. But a rocket doesn’t materialize from thin air on a launchpad. The liftoff is actually the climax of a very long story. (p. 331)
Christianity, in other words, introduced the idea that we are born into a state of natural equality (p. 332)
Christianity performed another vital service. It created the idea of the secular. (p. 332)
But Christians do not hold natural equality and the division of the sacred from the secular on the grounds that they are really good ideas. They hold them because God Himself walked this Earth and showed that He is no respecter of persons, and this same God ordered us to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. How will those ideas be sustained absent the convictions that made them historically relevant? Jonah recounts the famous account of Henry IV and his penitential trek to Canossa, but would Henry have submitted if he thought the secular/sacred division merely an historically useful fiction rather than the command of the living God? Jonah calls on us to close our eyes, grit our teeth, and simply believe really hard in liberal principles. It’s unlikely such a will to believe can successfully replace historic Christian faith (or the Deistic faith of the Founders).
There is evidence of this in Suicide of the West itself. Jonah recognizes the benefits of the traditional family:
Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude – and the effort that gratitude demands – all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. Few actually hate the traditional nuclear family or the role it plays. But many are indifferent to it. And indifference alone is enough to invite the rust of human nature back in. (p. 277)
But of what use is Jonah’s gratitude for the traditional nuclear family? His support for gay marriage — “marriage equality” — is well known. But if two mommies are as good as a mommy and a daddy, then fathers are dispensable to the family. And if they are, indifference to the traditional family structure seems entirely appropriate. Jonah’s gratitude for the traditional family offers no resistance to the most basic attacks on that family. How different it is for those who hold that the family, composed of a mother, father, and children, is an institution ordained by God, one that is prior to the state and that does not depend on the fickle will to believe of man for its existence.
Jonah ends the book with a declaration of the choice before us:
Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore. p. 351
I prefer: Principles die when no one believes anymore in the God who sustains them.
Published in General
Yes… and Jonah writes a fair amount about Locke, especially at the start of the book. What surprised me is that he then abandons the Lockean position entirely, with little explanation, and substitutes for it the view that we should act “as if” we have rights for the good effects they have. That’s a defensible view, but it seems to come out of nowhere. Perhaps a more thorough discussion of Locke was one of the things cut from the book (and Jonah says his original version was a lot longer.)
Given that some of the participants are now testily arguing about how they are arguing about how they are arguing, I think this thread may have reached its meta limit.
Just sayin’.
Well, meta-something, anyway.
It’s hard to talk about ethics for long without moving to metaphysics, or to talk about metaphysics for long without moving to epistemology. After doing epistemology for a while, one often finds oneself doing philosophy of language.
Larry’s and my long-standing dispute(s) might have reached that point. I.e., we might have disagreements in philosophy of language underlying everything else. Just a guess.
That’s your right, of course. In fairness, though, you are correct in saying that Jonah does not attempt to justify his decision to focus on the consequences of recognizing certain rights, rather than trying to prove that those rights are “natural” or “divine.” You said that Jonah’s approach is not justifiable. I offered you a justification. But if you won’t consider any justification that was not offered by Jonah himself, and since Jonah did not offer one, then there is nothing to talk about.
I am not inclined to start a thread dedicated to the proposition that all rights were invented by men for their own good, because pretty much everyone either (a) already agrees with me; or (b) holds religious beliefs that contradict my position. I never try to talk people out of their religious beliefs.
I agree with you that further discussion with you would not be fruitful if you are convinced that disagreement with you can only be religiously motivated. Peace
You guys should listen to Jonah’s interview on the Daily Show Podcast.
http://ricochet.com/podcast/daily-standard/jonah-goldberg-unplugged/
Charlie asks Jonah about the first sentence again, and I think Jonah gives the best answer I’ve heard so far.
He says (to paraphrase from memory), “Arguments from authority only work when everyone agrees on the authority.”
So, in my words, arguing that “God did it” works fine if you are only talking to people who already believe god did everything, but it isn’t that convincing to people that don ‘t believe god did everything. He also talks about the importance of persuasion, and obviously “God did it” isn’t going to persuade anyone. This was the mistake many on here made during the SSM wars – many people kept saying things like “it says so in the bible” to people that were self-described atheists and expected the atheists to accept the bible as the final word.
Any way, it is one of the best interviews I’ve heard on the book, which is interesting since it is three weeks after the books was released. I assume that is partly because he is past the whirlwind tour of the first couple weeks and he both more experienced and less tired.
Oh, yes. We agree on that. Which is why the West is going down in flames. We lack a cohesive, homogeneous view of moral authority. It’s all hyper-individualism and subjectivism now. Jonah G can talk until he’s blue in the face trying to “persuade” people. Won’t make a whit of difference. Everyone has “their” truth now.
We did not experience the same war at all. If you didn’t hear traditionalists making secular arguments, you were on a different battlefield than I.
I didn’t say all, I said many.
That’s true. St. Thomas Aquinas noted that arguments from authority are the weakest form of argument.
I’m not sure anyone on this thread has made any.
Just people complaining that Goldberg didn’t argue from authority.
That is why people are complaining about the first sentence in the book and this thread exists.
Certainly not. Saying “There is no God in this book” is not the same as not saying “God did it.” This line was unnecessary to his argument (although, one wonders to whom or what we’re supposed to be grateful! — Stumbling Fate?).
He’s sucking up to the secular Left in the hope of persuading them. I think he’s naive about the depth of their conviction about their own self-righteousness. There is a scant handful of persuadable leftists out there — David Mamet, Dave Rubin, … And they’re almost always mugged by reality, not just talked into the light of truth.
I would be curious to hear the distinction.
My theory is that Jonah observed Charles Murray’s clever/brilliant strategy for inoculating Coming Apart from potential criticism of “racism!” by factoring race out of the data sets he used for his book.
Clearly, Jonah decided to take religion out of the equation in similar fashion in order to inoculate his book from “religion!” criticism. The problem is that a broad discussion of American culture simply cannot be stripped of religion and remain cogent the same way that race can be filtered out of social science data in order to study a narrower subset of the data.
Since I resurrected this thread, it’s worth pointing out that I’ve been reading Niall Ferguson’s book, Civilization: The West and the Rest. I’ve listened to it on audiobook before, but after reading Jonah’s book, I decided to read it more closely so I borrowed it from the library. Among other things, Ferguson does more to compare the “West” to “the rest” and that alone makes it more thorough than Jonah’s book. But also, I think he might actually do a better job coming up with the core traits that define the West.
He says
I’m only about 25% of the way through the book (and my Rico membership will expire long before I finish so I can’t wait until I finish to post on it), but I think this book must be read in addition to Jonah’s book.
As for religion, he does not rely on God’s existence, but like Jonah, he does have some very important things to say about religion. For example, he quotes a Chinese official as saying: “In the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism” and says another Chinese businessman “feels he can trust his fellow Christians, because he knows they are both hard working and honest. Just as in Protestant Europe and America in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, religious communities double as both credit networks and supply chains of creditworthy, trustworthy fellow believers.”
I highly recommend the book.
People seem unable to understand the distinction between arguing from God as an authority, and arguing that the Miracle as an historical event owes a lot more to Christianity than Jonah acknowledges. The latter is an historical argument that’s got nothing to do with whether one actually believes in God or not. Similarly, I can argue that Middle Eastern culture owes a lot to Islam without actually believing in Islam.
And I could further argue the naivete of someone who thinks the Middle East could go on as before if the mass of Muslims stopped believing in Islam per se, and instead substituted a belief that Islam, while false, had good social consequences. Jonah is similarly naive in thinking we can substitute a belief in the good social consequences of fictional rights, for belief in actual natural rights.
Again, organized religion is not the same thing as God. Saying “There is no God in this book” is not the same thing as saying there is no organized religion in this book, it is simply rejecting the argument that God did it.
But I will never convince you of that, so let’s just agree to disagree.
I still think I prefer Ferguson’s list of “Killer Apps” to Jonah’s vague “Miracle” but they don’t rely on God either, so that doesn’t move this conversation forward at all.
Actually I agree with you on that. I don’t think anywhere in this thread, or on the OP, I argued that “God did it.” I can’t find anyone else on this thread arguing that “God did it.” At most I argued that people who believed in God did it – a very different thing. I’m puzzled why “God did it” keeps being brought up. It’s almost as though its the argument people want to oppose, even if no one is actually arguing it.
Yes, I was thinking similar thoughts. It seems the accusations of “arguing from authority” are coming from people who argue from secular authority. “I can’t hear what you’re saying because I know you believe in God and are therefore not a credible source.” We all suffer from confirmation bias.
The point is, people who believe in God ARE in the book, as you point out in the OP.
I clearly don’t understand the objection to the opening sentence: I can’t get past the notion that people who are angry that only people who believe in God are in the book and not God explicitly believe that God must be responsible for the Miracle. But as my membership is expiring in a couple of hours, I guess we will have to leave it there.
I don’t see that at all. What is this “secular authority” on which people like me are supposedly relying? I believe Jonah is arguing that we should not rely on any authority, but rather on results. Observable, concrete results. When Galileo apocryphally said “it still moves,” he was making an observation about results, despite the Church’s authority to the contrary. I’m with him.